That alone is enough to get me out of bed and ready for the day.
A knock comes at the door only a few minutes after I’ve slipped a pair of pants and a shirt over my head. The floor is cold under my feet as I cross over to the door and slip into the hallway to keep from waking Ivy.
Matvey is standing there with an expression I’ve only seen once on his face before. His hands are tucked behind his back like a soldier, his shoulders pulled tight with stress. He looks more worried than I’ve ever seen, and that alone is enough to scare me.
“I need to show you something,” he says. He doesn’t wait for an answer, just pivots on his heel and starts down the hallway.
I follow him into the living room. Outside, the last gray of daylight leaks through the street-facing windows, thin and ghostlike, turning the whole space into a somber kind of mood.
Matvey takes his seat behind the monitors, gesturing to the chair he’s already pulled up beside him. “Sit.”
I arch a brow but obey, lowering myself slowly. “What’s going on?”
He doesn’t answer me at first. Instead, he turns to face forward, his fingers quickly moving over his keyboard to input his password. The system unlocks with little flourish. Dozens of windows bloom across the monitors, some stacked on top of each other, spilling over like waves of code and graphs and lists. The sheer volume of information makes my eyes ache.
As I lower myself into the chair next to him, my eyes catch a familiar name up at the top of one of them.
Mine.
“What am I looking at?” I ask.
“Your phone’s call records.” His finger taps once against the screen, a crisp sound against the soft hum of the computer. He highlights a single line. The timestamp from last night glows there like a flare. An outgoing call to a number I don’t recognize.
My brow furrows. “And?”
Matvey doesn’t reply. Instead, he clicks on another file. Up comes a map that he slides into view. A series of red dots blink in sequence across a digital landscape. Each point is a trail leading to a facility name that means nothing to me, to a company I’ve never even heard of.
The cursor hovers there, steady as a sniper’s sight.
“Matvey. What is this?”
“I traced the number back to this location.” His tone is calm, but there’s an edge underneath that surprises me. “Cross-referenced the carrier and the cell tower it was pinged from just to make sure this wasn’t a false mark.” He flicks his wrist and another window appears, this one full of corporate filings. “The facility connected to the outgoing number is a company registered to Mikhail.”
My eyes widen. How the hell…?
“You said it was a number that was called from my phone?” I manage.
“Yes.” His eyes cut to mine.
I lean back slightly, bewildered. “How is that possible? I don’t know any number associated with Mikhail other than the one burner he’s called us from. But that hasn’t been active in weeks.”
Matvey exhales sharply through his nose—a sound halfway between a sigh and a hiss. The faintest flicker of emotion crosses his face before it’s smoothed out again. “I caught Ivy talking to someone last night when she was supposedly taking a shower. I believe she’s the one who made the call from your phone.”
My stomach drops. Denial hits me instantly. “That’s not possible.”
His gaze doesn’t waver. It pins me in place, unblinking. “It happened. I checked a dozen times before I came to you about this.”
For a second, I can’t think. My mind claws for logic, for some kind of explanation that would make more sense than the obvious one Matvey’s implying. Then, like pieces slotting together in a puzzle I never wanted to solve, the truth begins to form.
Ivy… I’d felt her stir in the middle of the night and get out of bed. With my hazy vision, I’d seen the silhouette of her moving around the room, searching for something. My mind had been too exhausted to call out to her before she’d slipped out the door. It wasn’t until she’d come back a little while later with faint condensation still clinging to her skin that I realized she’d taken a shower.
The words snap out of me before I can stop them. “She has no reason to call him. There has to be another explanation for this.”
Matvey doesn’t even flinch. He lets out a long, tired sigh, the sound too old for someone his age. “Look. The records don’t lie,Pakhan.You can believe what you want, but these are the facts.”
He’s right. The facts don’t care how much I want this to be a misunderstanding. It’s just data—names, times, signal traces, carrier tags. None of it is personal.
The implication hangs in the air.
